


snowfall in freefall

by Serie11



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arendelle (Disney), Exploration, Kairi Lives, Multi, Post-Kingdom Hearts III, Snow and Ice, Sora Lives, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:42:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21532417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serie11/pseuds/Serie11
Summary: Brought back to Arendelle due to a strange signal, Sora, Riku, and Kairi must investigate the icy mountain maze for a way to solve the mystery.
Relationships: Kairi/Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 28
Collections: Kingdom Hearts Holiday Gift Exchange





	snowfall in freefall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [star54kar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/star54kar/gifts).



Sora pokes at the snow drift, trying to determine if there’s anything underneath the lump of whiteness besides a bush. Elsa isn’t encouraging a wild snowstorm anymore, but there’s still plenty of snow up here near the top of the mountain, and that means that Sora has a lot of places he needs to check for clues.

“Find anything?”

Kairi’s voice is quiet, but it still rings out across the snowy mountain top. Sora turns so he can see her and shakes his head. In the few hours that they’ve been walking around up here, there’s been no trace of the signal that brought them here. It’s strange – normally he attracts trouble like a magnet attracts iron.

“Nothing,” Riku replies from where he’s prowling under a few trees, managing to talk without the echo of his voice ringing around them for everyone to hear. Riku steps out into the open and lifts a hand to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare as he looks around.

Sora resists the urge to sigh. They’ve been walking around for a while, and without Donald’s magic he’s wet and cold. Even exploring the area with Riku and Kairi isn’t enough to keep his growing frustration at bay. He motions for Riku to come over.

The three of them regroup behind the shelter of a rock. “We’ve been looking for a while – I can’t sense any light magic, Riku can’t smell any darkness, and Sora hasn’t magically found anything. It was probably a false alarm,” Kairi points out. “That, or whatever was here is gone now. Maybe it can jump through a dark portal to another world, or just to the Realm of Darkness.”

“Maybe,” Riku muses. “We’ve only searched the top of the mountain – let’s search around the path leading to the summit. If we still don’t find anything, then we can call it a day.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Sora agrees. Riku uses doubleflight to jump to the top of the rock, and Sora grabs Kairi’s hand and they jump together. Kairi still has trouble gliding on her own, but Sora is sure that she’ll pick it up soon. The ground drops away from underneath them as they cross a valley, and a strange type of giddiness rises up within him. If his ability to glide suddenly disappeared, he fall all the way to the ground, which he can’t even see. The thought sends a rush of adrenaline through him, and he opens his mouth to shout, only to instead swallow a flurry of snowflakes as he’s hit by a gust of wind.

The three of them make their way through the peaks and spires of rocks, slowly descending the mountain. The snow doesn’t recede – Sora frowns until he realises that they’re near Larxene’s ice palace.

Aha. Maybe there was something behind Aqua’s signal after all.

“Hey Kairi,” he says. “Remember I told you about that ice maze?”

“Yeah,” Kairi replies. Even now that they’re walking instead of gliding, she’s still holding his hand. They round the corner, and she narrows her eyes as the strange entrance made of ice and darkness comes into sight. “Is that it?”

“Yep. I didn’t think that it would still be after we defeated Larxene.”

“Do you think that caused the signal?”

They come to a stop in front of the entrance. Sora narrows his eyes as he surveys it distrustfully. The entrance does nothing in response. He wonders if that makes it more or less suspicious. “Only one way to find out.”

They poke around the entrance while they wait for Riku to appear. It takes him longer to navigate the mountains, since he has to be a bit choosier about the route that he uses to pass over the long drops that Sora and Kairi can simply glide over. Sora doesn’t find any new tracks from the Heartless, but that doesn’t mean anything if they’re trapped inside the maze. In fact, the snow is undisturbed, just like it has been all morning. Aren’t there any animals around here?

Riku finally lands next to them, leaping off the bluff from above. He eyes the maze. “Found something?”

“Maybe,” Sora says. “Wanna find out?”

Riku lifts a corner of his mouth in a grin. “Let’s.”

Sora steps up the entrance to the maze. He’s only been in here once, because even though the portal to enter was always here, he’d never been back inside. Being in there once was more than enough – the entire thing had creeped him out.

The maze highlights everything in an eerie blue. Kairi’s hair looks purple under the light, while Riku looks like Aqua. Sora can only imagine what he looks like.

“Last time we were there, we found the central room to escape. Maybe there’s something there, or around, that will let us dispel this place?” Sora suggests.

“We should stick together,” Kairi says. “Getting separated in a maze sounds like a bad idea.”

“I agree,” Riku nods.

“There were lots of Heartless in here last time as well, so we should keep an eye out for them too. Though without anyone summoning them, I don’t know if we’ll encounter any.”

“Noted,” Riku says, eyes sharp as he surveys the area. They start forward, and Sora resists the urge to summon his Keyblade. There aren’t any enemies around – there’s no reason for him to, besides the icy unease creeping up the back of his neck.

They wander through the rooms. Sora doesn’t remember most of them, but he was only here once, and it does seem quite different without Heartless challenging him at every opportunity.

Kairi finds a chest that he missed the first time, and pulls out a sparkling bracelet that she admires before slipping on. Riku is able to use doubleflight to reach some tricky areas that the other two can’t, but he doesn’t report anything of interest. Sora is just about to say that he recognises the room they’re in, when they take a turn and suddenly he doesn’t.

“Uh…” he says, looking around. There are strange carvings etched into the icy walls, symbols that he can’t make much sense of. “I don’t remember this from last time.”

“Maybe we’re on the right track, then,” Kairi says, optimistic.

“Maybe,” Sora agrees. He takes another step, and slips on the ice – he hits the ground hard, and winces as he does so. “Ouch.”

Kairi reaches out her hand to help him up, but that’s the exact moment that the ground beneath him disappears, and he falls into the depths.

* * *

“ _Sora!_ ”

Riku watches him disappear into the icy ground, and the hole that he fell through close up right behind him, leaving nothing but smooth ice behind. Magic curls in the space that Sora was just in, and Riku wrinkles his nose. A strange combination of light and dark winds around each other.

“Sora!” Kairi cries out. She grasps at the ice, but it’s slick and shiny and hard, and doesn’t give beneath her hands. She summons her Keyblade and looses a fire spell, but that does nothing either.

“Kairi, stop,” Riku says grimly, putting a hand on her shoulder. She looks up at him, a crease between her eyes.

“But…”

“We’ll find him,” he reassures her. “It must have taken him somewhere below. He said that he didn’t recognise this place. We’ll just have to uncover any secrets and find him, yeah?”

Reassured, Kairi nods. Riku purses his mouth and carefully steps further inside the maze, the icy walls closing in slightly. He tries to not to let on how tight his shoulders are. He lets out a breath. To help Sora, he has to move forward. The other boy is probably working away at the problem from his end too, but Riku and Kairi can help by clearing the path back to the surface. For the first time, Riku wishes that Aqua had come along with them. She’d asked if they needed the help, but Riku had wanted to try and prove his own usefulness as a Master by tackling the problem without her. Sora and Kairi coming along with him was just a bonus.

Maybe if he hadn’t been so eager to prove their abilities, they could have had extra backup. He clenches his jaw but heads down the first flight of stairs they come across. The aura of the place swirls around them, blurring the lines between light and dark.

“I thought that’d this trip would be more fun,” Kairi sighs. “Our first journey out together after saving the worlds, and after I’ve finished my training, and we’re walking through some strange icy maze, and Sora’s been taken somewhere, and we haven’t even had a snowball fight…”

“We’ll find him,” Riku says again, and wonders this time if it’s more for her benefit or his.

“Yes,” Kairi agrees. “But tomorrow we should go and have a nice, relaxing day on the beach… pineapple juice… the sand and waves…” she sighs.

Riku feels a pang in his chest. “Sounds great.”

“We just need to find Sora first. Of course he makes us search for him, the lazy bum.” She kicks off the side of the wall and overtakes him, heading further into the maze. Riku is just glad that the icy walls are emitting a strange, blue glow – he doesn’t fancy blundering around here in the dark.

Kairi pauses as she steps into a wider room. Riku enters cautiously, looking around. There’s a chest in the corner that Kairi goes over to tap with her Keyblade. There’s a podium in the middle of the room, glowing softly. Riku steps up to it but doesn’t touch it. There’s a strange glyph that he doesn’t recognise, emitting a low light from the centre of the podium. He narrows his eyes as he traces it. Aqua had started instructing all of them in the old magic, and the lore of the worlds, but there’s a lot of ground to cover and they’ve only just started. He doesn’t recognise any of these symbols. 

“Found something?”

“This room is a dead end,” Riku points out. “But there’s probably still a way forward. This place reeks of magic, light and dark. And this thing has an aura of magic about it, too.”

Kairi peers at it. “It looks old. Sora said that Larxene created this place, right?”

“Apparently,” Riku says, thoughts somewhere else. There’s a deeper thrum to the magic in this place, something that even Xehanort didn’t have. Wild and primal, it tugs on his senses. “I don’t think she created this place from scratch, though. She might have just opened the entrance so that people on the surface could enter. The magic here is far too old for her to have created it a few months ago – and she was a creature of lightning, not ice. If she created something herself, it would have been imbued with her nature.”

Kairi hums thoughtfully. “Makes sense. Well, are you going to activate it?”

Riku looks down the glyph and slowly puts his hand on it. The glow brightens, and he narrows his eyes to protect them from the glare.

“Riku!”

He only has half a second to try and reach out before the light swallows him.

* * *

Kairi curses as she jogs through the maze. She isn’t that good at fire magic – not good enough to keep herself warm in this place, anyway. Sora had insisted that they all brought proper coats, so she should be fine in the short term, but they hadn’t packed the supplies necessary to camp in this icy place for even one night.

“Sora! Riku!”

Her voice echoes through the corridor. She huffs and keeps jogging. Surely, if she travels far enough, she’ll find the both of them. The floor is slippery under her feet, but after she’d slipped over two times, she’d found her balance.

She passes through another room, and is faced with two possible choices. She peers down one – stairs spiral downwards a few paces in. In the other direction, the corridor continues on. She returns to the door with the stairs, and descends. Riku and Sora are probably being held deeper within the maze, so heading down seems like the best idea.

As soon as her feet hit the bottom, a whisper alerts her to Heartless appearing. Senses sharp, she steps into a room and hears the door seal behind her.

The several Heartless inside the room spit ice at her, and Kairi dodges around the projectiles until she gets close enough to start landing hits on them. The Heartless lash out with a spike of ice that she narrowly avoids, and she retaliates with a fire ball, feeling the magic leap from her gut, draining out her fingers to the end of her Keyblade, and emerging in a blast of flame. The Heartless disappears in a puff of smoke, and Kairi deals with the other two in the room. As soon as they’re gone, several other enemies spawn in – she thinks they’re Nobodies, but she’s never seen them before. They jitter about on spindly legs, and when she gets close to them they spit lightning.

Ah. Larxene’s influence.

She comes away from the fight with only a few hairs singed off, and her magic stores depleted. She leaves the room, opens a chest in the next corridor, and descends another set of stairs.

“Where could those boys be,” she mutters. Her light sheen of sweat has almost frozen uncomfortably on her skin – it’s getting colder as she goes lower. She shrugs her coat closer around her shoulders and keeps walking.

She hopes she doesn’t encounter many more enemies – she dealt with the ones she came across, but it wasn’t that easy, and she hasn’t explored very far by herself before. It’s a bit daunting, but she doesn’t exactly have a choice besides pressing on.

At least the loot is good. She passes by another chest and lifts some glittering gems from inside. She recognises it as a type of synthesis material, and she hasn’t seen it before so it’s probably rare. She’ll have to show it to Sora. He’s teaching her about synthesis, and with her long history of tinkering with accessories, she’s picking it up quickly, but some things take time. She pockets the gems and peers down the darkness of a slide. It’s steep and looks slippery, and she doesn’t think that she’ll be able to come back up this way.

“Well, nothing for it,” Kairi says. She dispels her Keyblade and edges down the slide, trying not to slip. It works for a few scoots, but then something shifts under her, and she’s spirally, picking up speed as the slide becomes steeper and steeper. She can’t help but let out a yell as the tunnel grows smaller and darker, and she squeezes her eyes shut as she’s swallowed by the maze.

* * *

Sora hits the ground with a hard thump. He’d just landed on his butt a minute ago, and the double impact has him wincing.

“Riku? Kairi?”

No one answers him. He gets to his feet slowly, rubbing the sore spots. It looks like he’s in a cell of some sort – there are ice bars running across the entrance of the room.

“Well that’s not going to keep me out,” Sora says, unimpressed. He calls his Keyblade and unlocks the bars. They melt, and he steps out into the corridor. The cells chimes softly as it seals itself behind him.

This place is a dungeon of some sort – there are more cells on both sides of the corridor, and they continue as far as he can see. Sora peers into the cells as he passes them, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone else in any of the cells. Indeed, there’s no sign that they’ve ever been used, each cell identical to the last. There’s no way to differentiate each cell either. Even though he’s been walking for a few minutes, it doesn’t feel like he’s covered any ground at all.

Frustrated, he starts running instead of walking. The corridor is straight, so there’s no chance of him running in a circle, so eventually he’s going to have to come to an end for this place.

“Weird that there’s so many cells but no one in them,” he says. “There isn’t exactly a lot of people on the mountain. And with all the Heartless that used to be up here, that probably scared everyone else off. Lucky we came here before someone got stuck.”

He hears a soft chime, and pauses.

“Kairi!”

Sora brightens. “Hey, Riku!”

“Sora?”

Sora runs towards Riku’s voice. His boyfriend is in a cell, grumpily looking at the bars. Sora unlocks it for him, and Riku steps out into the corridor.

“Hey Riku,” Sora says, glad to have found him. “Where’s Kairi?”

“I got teleported here, just like you,” Riku says huffily. “This place is really starting to get on my nerves.”

“Lucky you got teleported to this cell near me,” Sora says. “I’ve been running down this corridor for ages.”

Riku looks up both sides of the corridor, lifting his head to scent the air lightly. “It’s an illusion,” he says, frowning. “You’ve probably been running past the same cells.”

“Aw,” Sora sighs. “So how do we get out?”

Riku shrugs his coat closer. “We’ll have to break the illusion. It shouldn’t be a problem for both of us working together.” He heads for one cell that looks exactly the same as all the others. “I think this one’s fake.” He reaches out and his hand touches the icy bars of the cell – even so, he nods.

“Cut through it?” Sora asks. Riku reaches over and takes his hand, and Sora squeezes it. Riku flashes a grin at him and nods. Sora summons his Keyblade and Riku summons Braveheart. Sora reaches out to Riku’s heart and together they tune themselves to ring at the same frequency. Sora revels in the feeling, and then slashes down at the exact same moment that Riku does. Sora feels the magic peak and then break, and he hangs onto Riku’s hand as the barrier crashes down around them.

When the brightness clears, there’s a spiralling staircase in front of them. Sora grins at Riku. “We did it!”

Riku nods. “This is probably the deepest level of the maze. The control room should be somewhere above us.” He pauses. “I don’t think that Larxene created this place.”

Sora starts up the stairs. “What do you mean?”

“It’s too old, and it’s ice magic, not lightning magic,” Riku explains. “She probably just found this place and brought it to the surface. We might not be able to destroy it completely.”

“If it’s a natural part of this world, then we probably don’t need to,” Sora points out. “If we just remove the ability to enter this place easily, then no one should wander across it and decide to explore. And if it’s meant to be here, then taking it away might disrupt the balance of the world.”

“True,” Riku agrees. “If Larxene was able to make it appear, then it should be within our abilities to make it disappear.”

Sora pokes his tongue out at him, only to cut the action off quickly as his tongue starts to go cold. “Anything she can do, we can do better.”

Riku laughs. “Sure.”

They reach the top of the stairs. They open out into a very large room – Sora can only just see the other side of the hall. There are pillars of ice at seemingly random intervals across the floor, and the ceiling is very high. He tilts his head slightly. There’s a strange sound that’s echoing through the hall, and it’s gradually getting louder. He looks at Riku and sees him frowning as well.

“What’s–”

Out of a dark entrance at the other side of the hall, Kairi spills forth, tumbling across the ground and still yelling. She groans slightly and puts a hand to her face.

“Kairi!” Sora shouts, warmth swelling in his chest.

She looks up. Sora starts making his way across the hall, stepping around the spires of ice.

“Sora,” Riku calls from behind him, a warning. Sora looks towards the centre of the room on instinct.

A mass of darkness is forming, quickly going from a ball about the size of Sora’s head to the size of a building. He runs faster, and reaches Kairi’s side in time to help her to her feet.

“Um,” she says, staring at the ball. “Is that something we need to worry about?”

“Yes,” Riku says, reaching them. He eyes Kairi for several seconds before turning back to the mass of darkness. It’s starting to glow with a brilliant light – Sora can feel the two forces wrestling with each other, before they come to a sudden balance.

“That’s the heart of this place,” Kairi says. Sora doesn’t question her.

“Then we’ll have to take it down.” Sora summons his Keyblade, and hears the other two do so as well. “That should convince the maze that it should retreat to where it used to be!”

The darkness and light gains shape as a mammoth creature – it has wickedly sharp claws and teeth, and looks almost like the wolf-Heartless that Sora fought here before. He hopes it doesn’t summon a giant storm like that Heartless did. Or maybe it’s not like a wolf – it has icy hooves, and… antlers?

“It’s a moose!” Riku yells. “Be careful!”

Sora gets into his fighting pose as the creature roars.

* * *

Riku sends a dark firaga towards the beast. It roars as the spell hits, but that successfully distracts it for long enough for Sora and Kairi to get in close and land several combos. Riku casts cure with his remaining stamina, and Sora yells out his thanks.

This creature is fast for something that large, but it’s still slow enough for the three of them to work around. It seems to prefer charging attacks, and Riku jumps twice to escape one of them, one of the horns sheathed with darkness coming threateningly close.

“This thing won’t go down!” Kairi shouts.

“It normally takes a while,” Sora shouts back. Riku doesn’t say anything, instead concentrating on landing several hits with his Keyblade while the creature recovers from the charge, and from hitting the back of the hall. He backflips when it spins around, bellowing loudly.

He lands next to Kairi while Sora darts around to the side, yelling as he casts his grand magic. A giant blizzard bursts in front of the creature’s face, but it barely notices before it charges again.

“Maybe don’t use ice magic against the ice thing!” Kairi yells as she dodges to one side and Riku cartwheels to the other. Sora’s awkward laugh echoes through the chamber.

“Good idea! Fire magic is probably better. Should have thought of that.”

Riku ignores both of them to cast another dark firaga. The ball splashes as it hits icy grey fur, clinging as it burns for several seconds before the cold snuffs it out. Riku fires a few more blasts off, but they seem to annoy the creature more than anything else.

Riku dodges another charge, and then a follow up ice attack that uses the ice spikes already on the ground to send out a hail of dangerously sharp icicles. Kairi gets hit by a few and Riku sends a potion over her way.

He regroups with Sora and Kairi, and the three of them pant as they look at the creature. It’s more blue and white than grey now, and even as he looks, the ice around its feet creeps upwards to protect more of its legs.

“We have to finish this soon,” Riku says. He doesn’t want to fight this thing if its defence keeps increasing.

“Got any bright ideas?” Kairi asks.

“It’s a creature of darkness and light,” Sora says thoughtfully. “It’s probably meant to protect this place. It might need a show of power that represents both light and dark to pacify it.”

The three of them eye each other. Riku shifts his weight. He knows what Sora is talking about, but they haven’t been able to do it in a real combat situation before – only while they were practising during training.

“We should try,” Kairi says firmly, and Sora nods. Riku takes a deep breath, but he can’t see a reason to disagree.

The three of them scatter as the creature charges again, and then Sora lands in the middle of the hall and holds up his hand. “Kairi! Riku!”

“I’m here!” Kairi yells, and falls into her place at his right. Riku lands on Sora’s right.

“I’m here,” he affirms, and summons a ball of darkness. Kairi summons a ball of light, and Sora readies his Keyblade. Riku lobs a ball of darkness at Sora, and Sora hits it towards the creature. Kairi does the same on the other side with a ball of light. At the second impact, the guardian howls. Sora laughs as he hits another ball of darkness from Riku.

Riku creates another few dark globes, pulling them from the shadows within himself. Just as he’s feeling the pull of the dark grow uncomfortable, Sora jumps. Riku follows, because he can’t ignore him, not when his heart is pulling him along so strongly. Kairi laughs alongside him, and the three of them curve towards their enemy. Riku covers for Kairi and Kairi covers for Sora and Sora covers for Riku, and the three of them are a whirlwind of blades, attacking without need for rest. Stunned, the guardian can only stand stunned before their combined might.

Sora lands, and Riku is only a second behind him. Kairi completes their perfect triangle, and Riku breathes, feeling the flow of feelings between the three of them. Kairi’s eyes crease in a grin, but Sora’s eyes are closed in concentration. The golden glow of a trinity appears at their feet and Riku lets his heart connect with Sora and Kairi, waiting for the perfect second to move. The three of them thrust their Keyblades up into the glowing ball of light above their heads at the exact same moment, and glimmering beams of light and shadowy lines of darkness peel away from them. The guardian lets out a startled call – Riku still has his eyes open, so he’s able to see how it stutters, hesitates, and then bursts into its own ball of light and dark.

He laughs then, at the freedom he feels, at how Sora and Kairi are nestled so close to him. The hall fades out, and then it’s just the three of them, inside the quickly melting ice maze.

“We have to go!” Riku shouts, and starts running towards the staircase that has appeared in the middle of the room. Sora and Kairi are hot on his heels as his foot hits the first step, and Riku looks forward.

* * *

Kairi yawns as the trio trudges down the mountain. It’s been a long day, and honestly, she’s ready to fall into bed and go to sleep.

“Cool that we didn’t have to worry about closing the maze up,” Sora says. He’s walking with both his hands locked behind his neck, like they’re just out on a stroll. Kairi wishes that she had his energy.

“Defeating the guardian was probably the way to lock the maze,” Riku points out. “It was angry. The maze is probably meant to be somewhere else on this world, and the guardian was just upset that it had been put somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be.”

“Do you think it’s gone back to that place now?” Kairi asks.

Riku hums. “Probably. We disrupted the magic that was holding it there – there wasn’t a lot in the first place, really. Larxene didn’t have to work very hard to tether the maze to that location. It was never meant to be moved, so it didn’t have any defence against that type of attack.”

“I’m glad it’s back where it’s supposed to be,” Sora says cheerfully. “Can you feel it? The balance of this world is a little bit better.”

Kairi scrunches her nose. As a Princess of Heart, she’s supposed to be able to sense this sort of thing, but she hasn’t been to enough worlds to really tell them apart yet. If she reaches, deep into the earth… maybe…

She sighs. Or maybe not. No matter how hard she thinks, she can’t feel anything about the balance of the world, even though _Sora_ can sense it, and he doesn’t have a natural disposition towards that type of magic. She’ll just have to go to more worlds. Cheered up slightly, Kairi nods to herself. This trip today is only going to be the start of many adventures.

“Do we have to report in to Aqua as soon as we get back?” Sora asks. “I mean, it’s probably really late in the Land of Departure…” he yawns.

Kairi sees the fond look that Riku gives Sora. “We have to get back first.”

They reach the place where they parked the gummi ship, and Kairi clambers into the ship after her two boys. Sora is already in his place at the driver’s console, and Riku takes up the gunner’s position. Kairi buckles herself in as a co-pilot, even though it should be a quiet ride. Ever since Xehanort was defeated, there have been few Heartless in the routes that Sora takes them through.

Sure enough, she falls asleep at the controls and only wakes when Riku places a hand on her shoulder.

“We’re here,” he says, and she stretches before undoing her seatbelt. Riku sweeps her up into his arms, and she squeaks slightly.

“Let me down,” she laughs, thumping a fist against his chest. Riku ducks down to the exit of the ship. Kairi curls her arms around his neck and looks up into the sky as they step onto the ground of the Land of Departure. Stars are twinkling merrily in the sky, and she lets out a quiet sigh of relief. Seeing the stars in their proper places always calms her.

She jumps out of Riku’s arms now that she has more room to manoeuver, but sticks by his side as they enter the castle. Sora must already be ahead of them, because Riku gestures to the gummi ship and it closes the hatch before it goes into low power mode.

“Are we reporting in to Aqua?” Kairi asks. Aqua sleeps rarely – it is entirely possible that she’s still awake and prowling around the castle.

Riku pauses for a moment. “She’s sleeping,” he says. “I can smell her dreams.” A shadow passes over his face. “She’s still recovering from her time in the darkness. She needs her rest – we can report in the morning.”

“Okay,” Kairi agrees. “Up to our room then?”

Sora must have been there already, because his snow jacket is sprawled across their bed. Kairi busies herself unpacking while Riku disappears to the bathroom. She puts all of their jackets away and then follows Riku, and brushes her teeth while he showers.

Sora is in bed when the two of them get back. Kairi changes into her pyjamas, and ducks under the covers. Sora grumbles but wriggles until Kairi is comfortably pressed against his side. Riku sighs softly from Sora’s other side, but Sora doesn’t crowd him, letting him have his space. Kairi puts her nose into the curve of Sora’s throat and closes her eyes.

“Good work today,” Sora mumbles, stroking a hand down her back.

“Yeah, good jobs guys,” Kairi yawns.

“We did well,” Riku agrees. His voice shifts to a lower note. “Now be quiet and let me sleep.”

Kairi giggles. “Okay, Riku.”

“Okay,” Sora agrees. Kairi breathes in his scent and snuggles into a comfortable position. After such a hectic day, being here with the two of them is just what she needs.


End file.
